Ellie's seizures begin-TR is pulling ahead academically. with it, a sense that 'life is quite literally a battle.' At 13, TR acquires a gun and a pair of glasses through an idyllic winter in Egypt, he shoots and stuffs birds there are no asthmatic attacks. (His 'strange seizures,' beginning at 14, will reverse their positions and with Ellie's drinking and descent, one awaits with pity and dread the birth of his daughter Eleanor.) And frail, asthmatic, intent, untiring 'Teedie.' McCullough devotes a chapter to childhood asthma-the total, terrifying agony, the exuberance afterward the immediate, 'exciting' family response, especially in privileged circumstances the timing of the attacks-in TR's case, on Saturday nights, gaining him joyful Sundays out-of-doors with Papa the sense of power and. Responsible, as a tiny, stricken child, for the family conviction 'that physical well-being and mental outlook are directly correlated.' Younger brother Elliott-serene, kind-hearted long the bigger of the two, and the better athlete. Older sister Bamie, 'Papa's pet'-plain, stooped, bright, absolutely dependable. His forever-Southern, forever-young wife Mittie, 'Little Mama'-whose heroic tales conveyed 'a sense of bloodline kinship with real-life men of action.' Her brother James Bulloch-builder of the celebrated Confederate raider Alabama, no less admirable to his proUnion nephew. readily touched by the sufferings of others.' New York gentleman newsboys' friend foe of venal politicians. Here is Theodore Roosevelt, Sr.-'a great bearded figure of a man. But he does not merely offer another, more complex and fine-tuned interpretation he has embedded it in the true-life equivalent of a Russian novel of relations and generations, of mood and moment (whence those 'mornings on horseback' at Oyster Bay) and shaded characterization. That is not, for one thing, what McCullough found in the thousands of Roosevelt family letters.

Indeed, those familiar with the story of the puny, sickly boy who made himself over by will power alone have the most to look forward to.

The biographer of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal has written a marvelous book, now, about the making of an exceptional being-and nothing that has appeared before, including Edmund Morris' recent The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, diminishes its interest or freshness or emotional force.

David mccullough roosevelt